#crimefiction: The Fall, Ritual In The Dark, Brighton Rock, Of Love And Hunger, Bad Penny Blues
#crimefiction
Play the old songs, Michael, play the old songs …
‘I have no friends, I only have accomplices now. On the other hand, my accomplices are more numerous than my friends: they are the human race.’
Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former big shot Parisian lawyer, and self-proclaimed ‘judge-penitent’, sits in Mexico City, a smoky, pokey bar in the murky depths of Amsterdam’s red-light district. And he tells a fellow Frenchman about the time when, given the chance to save a young woman’s life, he did nothing. And his subsequent fall from grace.
Albert Camus’ The Fall is a stylishly written series of monologues about the desensitising nature of modern life, guilt, ‘the fundamental duplicity of the human being’, responsibility and more. And it’s a right riveting read, it really is. The intimacy of Clamence’s barfly confession drags you along as we hear how, like a true noir protagonist, his life spirals further down from Parisian high life to Amsterdam’s fog and neon soaked, underbelly.
The Fall was Camus last work of fiction, published in 1956, four years before he died. At 146 pages is a short, bitter and hard-hitting espresso that will give more than a few jolts during a sleepless night. Bang, bang The Mighty Fall!
“Not since Dickens has a British fiction-writer dealt with murder in a book of such size and seriousness” – SUNDAY EXPRESS
Colin Wilson’s Ritual In The Dark is a cracking read and certainly a very British book. I first got ‘into‘ Colin Wilson– as I did with many writers, artists and filmmakers via music. In my later teens, one of my favourite bands was The Fall. The Fall‘s lead singer, okay dictator, was Mark E Smith. Like me, Mark E Smith was an over-read, working class, Northern lad who had left school at sixteen, blessed and cursed with an over ripe imagination.
The Fall, of course, were named after Alber Camus‘ best book but their previous name was The Outsiders, after another Camus book. But there was another The Outsider, I discovered after reading a MES interview. And one that wasn’t written by some namby-pamby Continental intellectual but by another ‘ over-read, working class, Northern lad who had left school at sixteen, blessed and cursed with an over ripe imagination.’ (Okay, Leicester isn’t really THE NORTH but you get my drift…)
And so I started to immerse myself deeply in the weird and frightening world of Colin Wilson. Of course, I avoided The Outsider for a long time – philosophy, the great waste of the tax payers’ money- but I’d heard that he wrote dark crime stories, including one, The Killer, which is partly set in my home town of Hartlepool. Hartlepool library, in fact, had lots of his books and you could usually find them in charity shops, which is where I found Ritual In The Dark.
So, ‘Ritual’ is that now well over-egged pudding, a serial killer story. A ‘modern day’ Jack The Ripper tale which would be called a period piece now. It’s a kind of British Crime and Punishment which takes place in a sexually and socially repressed 1950’s Britain and a vividly drawn Soho. Written in 1949 but published in 1960 it is distinctly pre- The Beatles (pre rebellious youth) and post WW2. It is also a distinctly British exploration of existential extremes featuring a murderer who kills as a creative act, a positive rebellion against the supposed unimportance of his existence.
Ritual In The Dark -Post war angst in a world where ‘we’ve never had it so good’ simply isn’t good enough.
‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him”
From its brilliant opening line, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938) grabs you by the throat and almost strangles you with its intensity. The lives of fantastically rich characters, such as big hearted Ida Arnold who is investigating Hale’s murder and Pinkie, the psychotic young gangster, intertwine in a gripping novel that is well-deserved of its classic status. The seaside town of Brighton itself is also one of the book’s strongest characters, as the glitz and grit collide.
I must confess, I’d never heard of this book or its author until relatively recently when I was discussing ‘seaside noir’ - and it was recommended to me.
Julian Maclaren-Ross seems to have been a bit of a rogue, to be sure, and he certainly seems to have lived a varied and colourful life. Of Love and Hunger is a novel inspired by his time as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman in the 1930s. It is rich with great characters and has a great sense of time and place.
Although it was written in 1943, Of Love and Hunger is really like a breath of fresh air. Maclaren-Ross has a strong authorial voice and the exploits of the novel’s protagonist are both tragic and humorous. Of Love and Hunger is an immensely satisfying read and the foreword by Paul Willits is also well-worth checking out.
At the start of the Swinging Sixties, a serial killer nicknamed Jack The Stripper stalked te streets of West London. In Bad Penny Blues, Cathi Unsworth smartly weaves together fact and fiction as she tells the stories of Stella – a young fashion- designer who is haunted by visons of the dead women – and PC Peter Bradley, a policeman who is investigation the killings.
First published in 2010 by Serpents Tail, Bad Penny Blues as been republished by Strange Attractor Press and now includes an introduction from no less than Greil Marcus, as well as The Ghosts Of Ladbroke Grove, a revealing afterword from Cathi Unsworth.
Bad Penny Blues remains a cracking yarn with a great sense of time and place and is, of course, highly recommended.
© Paul D. Brazill.